“Chickenfoot Soup” is such a captivating and weird (in all the best ways) story. What was the inspiration behind it? What was your process like, and did you run into any hiccups/problems while writing it?

As it so often happens, my inspiration for “Chickenfoot Soup” came from a few places. The first was an anthology call for Baba Yaga-based stories. Now, I have rarely ever in my authorial life managed to finish a story in time for the anthology that actually inspired it (and I don’t think this story broke that trend), but it did get me started thinking about witches and what they mean.

What pushes a woman to become the thing we are afraid of, the Lilith/anti-woman? My writing process was thinking about that pressure, about building a kind of emotional and spiritual claustrophobia that forces someone beyond fear and into being fearsome.

The writing process was also intensely personal. Many of the details come from what I’ve heard of the lives of the older women in my family. Women who have been able to be immensely brave while never actually thinking of themselves that way. They were just doing what they had to do, often for the sake of their children.

This story is a sort of meta commentary on fairy tales and the tropes that we tend to enjoy, and at the heart of it, you have the witch Baba, who lends Katarina an ear. What do you think it is about witches that we enjoy so much in fairy tales?

There’s a throughline in so many cultures of fear and reverence of what the witch represents: a woman who is beyond caring. The witch, in opposition to the traditional role of women in patriarchal cultures, is not powerful because of who her father, son, or husband is. Her ability to act on the world around her is not managed via her relationship to a man or anyone else.

There are many kinds of witches, some old, some young, some beautiful, others “grotesque” but what all of them share is that they don’t give a single fuck about your opinion and don’t waste time wondering if they should. And isn’t that magnetic? A person who is so self-possessed that it becomes a kind of magic?

We live in a society that wants us to care deeply about being the correct kind of beautiful, with acceptable bodies, and a desire for only that which society feels we deserve according to the social/racial caste that we have been born to. In many ways fairy tales—and stories in general—have existed to enforce that. Fairy tales both entertain and explain the rules of power, the sexual violence, the class structures that undergird our world—much in the same way that ancient societies told stories to explain the existence of thunder or the changing of the seasons. I find immense joy in using fairy tales to describe the possibilities of different worlds, much like Baba shows Katarina that being powerful is possible.

“Chickenfoot Soup” is also about regrets. Katarina talks a lot about her past with Baba and we learn some of the things she wished would’ve gone differently, and there’s even an opportunity for Katarina to make sure that something like that doesn’t happen to her daughter Ruby. What do fairy tales and this story in particular have to say about correcting or avoiding regrets?

Many fairy tales involve intergenerational legacies. Being born the seventh son of a seventh son, or being cast into poverty because of the errors of your parents, or getting cursed because your dad was rude to the wrong person. Very rarely do the fairy tales involve going back in time and making sure the fairy in the next kingdom receives an invite for them and their plus one to come to your christening. No one tells Hansel and Gretel in their cribs to go gluten-free and leaves them a pamphlet on the castle doctrine. Your sucky situation is what it is, this is simply the way the world was made.

But fairy tales also give us parameters on how we can move forward from that, how we—if given an extraordinary chance—can seize the opportunity for something different. Regrets are not useful when all of your brothers have been turned into swans. Either you learn how to talk to waterfowl or you take the very painful chance to change your future. Usually this involves adhering to some very arbitrary and unfair rules given to you by a much more powerful person. Which sounds an awful lot like how we are taught to relate to our teachers, bosses, and political leaders. Part of the joy of writing my own fairy tale is suggesting that there are other ways of escaping our unfair fates that don’t involve self-abnegation via thistle.

What’s next for you? Do you have any other stories or projects that you’re working on that you can tell us about?

I’m trying my hand at writing a novel for the first time. And yes, there’s witches in it!